“With my promotion to Serials Librarian I began the year 1952 spending less time at the general reference desk in order to focus on giving service in the Periodicals Department.”
“Talk about an exciting beginning ! Few prospective buyers were looking at the Teaneck House; Pat and I were in the market but couldn’t find a house we both liked … at a party I was reminiscing with Ralph whom I had known when I was at Bucknell …”
Do we really need any more of this? The quotes above are taken at random from a “My‐Life‐And‐Ever‐So‐Intoxicating‐Times” autobiography from the USA, the tone breezy vacuous and without any purpose other than to furnish another title in a publisher’s list. Will any library seriously consider spending £56 on this monotonous recital of the all‐too‐familiar? Hopes are raised early on when Eshelman deals with his most praiseworthy years, his youth as a conscientious objector during World War Two. His moral stand, his liberal politics and convictions deserve applause when he suffered their consequences in a time and country bristling with patriotic bunting and insecurity. That fact of his life deserves emphasis. And for that short period his narrative comes to life; it provides far the most revealing ‐ and most vividly sketched ‐ passage of the book. We are given a fascinating insight into the pains of the wartime prodigals, the COs. Precise and threatening, the facts and figures about their civilian public service in the desolate wastelands of Oregon replanting decimated forests are the book’s most valuable resource. After that, the deluge.
To those of us who have read (for reviewing purposes ‐ few can have done so for pleasure) other autobiographies of ‐ does this sound biassed? ‐ American fellow professionals, the present one will be completely familiar. The narrative is densely packed with hearty allusions to colleagues whose names will ring no bells this side of the Atlantic. There is, too, a generous sprinkling of names from the literary pantheon as if to emphasise the writer’s cultural credentials, and it all readily dissolves into a melting stream of anecdotes bearing on the internal politics of the profession Stateside, yet with a curiously cosy air of hometown complacency. It is an American trait ‐ we must honestly face it ‐ but it only redeems itself when handled by a Mark Twain or a Bret Harte, not,alas, as exhibited by our professional contemporaries.
Eric Moon’s foreword assures us that the Sacrecrow autobiographies were inaugurated “because some of us felt that the library profession was losing sight of its history”. And he refers to those who helped shape the principles and philosophies of the profession: a laudable ideal, yet one must ask if this specimen of a career, traced painstakingly through a labyrinth of often trivial detail, is the best way to explore our history? Personal experience can be ‐ ought to be ‐ relevant and significant; but meaning, purpose, cool self‐appraisal painfully arrived at after the lifetime’s experience, that is what is requisite if the recital is to be more than surface adornment. Sadly, this latest account fails on that score. It will induce only stupor over here, lacking as we do much knowledge of the personalities involved. The breathless American zeal, the hunger to encompass everything, is no substitute for what our history really requires: a mémoire à thèse.
No doubt, an individual life story can add some substance if so contrived, to our professional store and lore. It is hard to see the present sample having any resonance beyond the author’s or his colleagues’ lifetime. Personalities and factions move across the continent ‐ and the pages ‐ in hot pursuit of “goals”, yet despite its unflagging momentum it reads like the annals of a parish. But then, is not the USA just a big village at heart, an old fashioned town meeting straining to impress the rest of the world?
